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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

It can’t be understated how much impact Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had. Commander Keen was already quite the tech demo, with scrolling on a PC without dedicated hardware; the most advanced platforming you’d see at the time would be Price of Persia.

Wolf 3D felt like a next gen tech demo out of time. It was great fun, it was violent, it looked unlike anything else (besides Ultima Underworld). Of course, that monumental achievement looks insignificant when compared with Doom, which single-handedly added stairs, different floors, multiplayer (!) and modding.

Most of us here work in software. To see software so casually come in, introduce never seen before concepts, it’s so impressive to me. I don’t think That I know of something having quite this impact in other aspects of software.

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> It can’t be understated how much impact Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had. Commander Keen was already quite the tech demo, with scrolling on a PC without dedicated hardware

But ... the PC did have hardware supported scrolling? CGA, EGA, VGA and the various SVGAs all had a register for "address of beginning of screen". It was not well documented, and nontrivial to use especially because of the banked memory setup -- but it WAS there even on the first ever CGA, Hercules and Monochrome adapter which were all based on the 6845 - and also available on EGA, VGA etc - the latter made things even less usable by practically requiring Mode-X plane memory addressing to use.

And IIRC, that's what commander keen had used.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_6845#Tricks

I had no idea it was on the chip leve! I thought they came up with a software workaround. Thanks

Looking back, it is hard to believe so much famous games were released in such a short amount of time, in the early 90s. 1991 was the year of Civilization, Lemmings, Street Fighter II and the first SNES Zelda.

The classics of gaming were laid during these years.

Oh my, I totally forgot Lemmings! How could I? This thread is making me feel nostalgic.

I've played much "better" games than Doom in many ways, but never one so revolutionary for its time, and I've never been so genuinely afraid when playing.

But seriously: Overstated! You mean overstated!

> so genuinely afraid

As a little tyke I used to actually duck left of my monitor when an imp threw a fireball with my heart thumping. Replaying as an adult I'm like wtf that's just a lumpy mass of pixels, how could I have been so scared?

The original Alien vs. Predator vs. pretty scary, too. Especially the Marine missions. I once didn't move in the game for what felt like an hour or so and refused to go down a particularly bad lit corridor.

I remember watching my father play Descent and that was pretty much the first real 3D game I've seen (Germany, so there was a bit of trouble with Doom and Wolfenstein). And I was constantly trying to peek around corners by moving my head.

If you liked Descent, check out the radically different sequel Freespace 2. Somehow the devs snuck in a legal clause to make it freeware.

The control system is absurdly complex but exquisitely satisfying once mastered.

You should all check out overload by the original descent developers.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/

I'm reminded of stories of how people were reacted when showed the first moving pictures.

They, like us, quickly got used to it, but both film and interactive 3d computer games are very powerful things!

Oops!

We debate so much about feature creep in our relatively simple apps. Doom came around and gave us features we didn’t even know were possible.

Not only that, but they worked!

VGA has pixel perfect hardware scrolling in unchained mode "Mode-X".

Databases?

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